Page 30 of The Reformed Rake of Moorfield

“Exactly like the curtain.”

Eleanor came running down the path to them a minute later with her cap crooked and her eyes brilliant and wet, and stopped, and tried for composure, and abandoned the attempt as beneath the occasion. She seized Jane’s hands. “You did this. Don’t preen, you and his lordship between you. A man watches his friend go down on one knee in a hall full of servants and discovers his own knees work after all. My brother will want to be told formally. Hamish is putting his coat to rights for it this minute, which will take him some while, as he’s buttoned like a hasty parcel.” and then the laughing broke into the other thing entirely, and the two women stood among the herb beds holding on to each other while Charlotte, released at last, went cartwheeling her joy down the vicarage lawn, and the doctor watched them all from beside a spilled basket of gooseberries with the face of a man whose books had closed clean for the first time in three years.

***

Adelaide’s strategy for the county was announced at Thursday’s breakfast in the voice of a commander who has already given the orders and is now informing the infantry.

“We call at the Grange this morning. Ourselves, you and I, Miss Prescott, and no one else.” She quelled Robert’s raised eyebrow with a look. “Not you. A man in these matters is baggage. Attend to me. The county is at this moment deciding what story it will tell about this matrimony, and counties, like juries, are settled by whoever addresses them first. Augusta Fenwick is the county’s ear. We do not wait to be called upon and inspected. We call, first, promptly, as though inspection had never once occurred to us, and we present you, not as a governess elevated, which is their story, but as the family’s own choice, arrived in state, which is mine. Wear the grey silk.”

“I own no grey silk, only grey wool.”

“You own it as of this morning. It is on your bed, and we will discuss the liberty never. Come along.”

***

The Grange’s drawing room held, by the fortunes of a Thursday, exactly the audience the exercise required. Lady Fenwick presiding, the marchioness’s widowed cousin still down for the summer, and one of the squires’ wives from the dinner, the sister-of-the-turned-off-governess one, caught mid-call with her teacup at half-mast. The room performed its small seismic adjustment as they were announced. Mrs Adelaide Moorfield, and Miss Prescott. Devoid of official title, stripped of any explanatory preamble, a solitary name, presenting itself unheralded. Lady Fenwick rose, which she did not do for governesses, and came forward with both hands out, and adjusted her demeanour with the swift, the seamless composure of a woman who had survived fifty years of county weather by always knowing which way it was about to blow. “My dear Miss Prescott. My dear Mrs Adelaide. You will forgive the household its flutter. We had the news Tuesday, and I have spoken of nothing else since. I said to Sir Giles that very evening, I have seen this coming since the festival, since the dinner, indeed. I fancy I saw it before anyone in the county.”

“You saw it across your own dinner table, Augusta,” said Adelaide, settling into the best chair as into a gun emplacement. “I recall your lorgnette getting a deal of exercise. How fortunate that what it found was a matrimony of affection with the family’s blessing. It might have found something so much less creditable to repeat.”

It was beautifully done, absolution and warning fused in one sentence, the past re-invoiced and marked paid, and Lady Fenwick, no simpleton, took the settlement at speed and moved to secure her own position in the new order, which was, transparently, first friend of the future viscountess. The tea came, the visit assembled itself, and only once did the old weather attempt a return, when the marchioness’s cousin, stranded outside the new found feelings, composed the third person one last time, “and shall Miss Prescott continue with the dear child’s lessons, one wonders, after, that is, it must be so awkward, the, arrangement…” and the room held its small breath.

Jane set down her cup and answered for herself, before Adelaide’s artillery could traverse.

“Miss Charlotte’s education continues under my direction, ma’am, wedded or maiden. It was the first term of the settlement and his lordship conceded it before the ring.” She said it pleasantly, plainly, in her own voice at its own level. “As for awkward. I have dined at the foot of tables four years, and I am persuaded the head of one will prove no harder to survive. The seating is better, and the mutton arrives warmer.”

The pause lasted one heartbeat. Then came Lady Fenwick’s laugh, spontaneous and unmastered, and the company surrendered to it. The marchioness’s cousin sought refuge in her teacup, leaving her lorgnette, as Jane remarked, resting quietly by her saucer throughout the visit: an instrument of war set aside in a time of truce.

***

In the carriage home, Adelaide looked out at the hedges with the stillness of deep satisfaction.

“The mutton arrives warmer,” she said at last, to the window. “Forty years I have wanted the roof of that woman’s drawing room to come off, and a merchant’s daughter has done it with a joint of mutton.” She turned. “You’ll do, Lady Moorfield. I have said so before, I believe. I find the entry bears repeating.”

***

Charlotte was waiting on the front steps when the carriage came up the drive, had been waiting, by the evidence of the abandoned hoop and the gravel-marks of patrol, and she took Jane’s hand before Jane’s feet had fairly found the ground, and said, with the crackless gravity she kept for affairs of state. “There is a matter. It wants you and Uncle Robert both. In the east corridor.”

They went, exchanging one look over her head, and Charlotte led them along the quiet corridor where the carpet gave out, and the light came thin from the high window, and stopped at the panelling below it, and turned, and faced them both with her hands folded, a monarch at a treaty table.

“You are entering into matrimony,” she said. “Everyone says everything changes.” A breath, drawn from somewhere old. “So the borders have to change too. That’s the law.” And she reached up and pressed the beading at the third panel’s edge, and the panel swung inward on the small dark room, the blanket, the wooden horse, the biscuit tin, the whole capital city of the hidden country, and she stood back, and looked at her uncle, whom she had never once shown, and gave him the freedom of it in the flat brave voice of a sovereign ceding her last sovereign secret

“This is where I went. When it was too loud. Jane knew. Now you know.” The blue eyes came up, fierce with the cost of it. “You can know where I am always now. Both of you. That’s my wedding present, because I haven’t any money, and Mrs Brooks says presents should cost the giver something.”

Robert went down slowly on his heels before the little dark doorway, before the blanket, the horse with its worn mane, the year of it, and Jane watched him take the present’s full weight, watched him understand it entirely and refuse, absolutely, to make it small with comfort. When he spoke, his voice was as grave as the giver’s.

“It is the richest present I have ever been given, and I have been given estates.” He looked into the little room a long moment. “I hid behind a curtain once, in the old parlour, and I told you nobody was better at looking. I withdraw it. Somebody was worth coming out for, in the end. She’s to be your aunt in a fortnight, and this room stays yours, Charlotte, borders open, crown intact. A country doesn’t stop being a country because it signs a treaty. It just stops being alone.”

Charlotte considered this ruling from all sides, found it constitutionally sound, and nodded once, and then the state occasion ended as her state occasions ended, all at once, and she was between them, one hand in each, hanging her whole weight and swinging, and the three of them went back down the thin-lit corridor together, past the high window, out of the hidden country and into the ordinary golden one, with every border standing open behind them.

***

The banns were read on the Sunday, in the parish church whose green they had danced on, and the vicar, Eleanor’s brother, a mild man who had waited his whole incumbency for a sentence this good, read them with a relish that was remarked upon as far as Chichester. Robert Edward Moorfield, of this parish, and Jane Prescott, of this parish. Of this parish. Jane sat in the Moorfield pew between Charlotte and Adelaide and heard the words settle over the crowded church, and understood what the vicar’s small emphasis had given her, deliberately, in front of everyone. Not the viscount’s name beside hers, but the belonging. Four years of nowhere, and a parish had claimed her in open church.

The congregation did not even pretend not to turn. Jane sat straight under the wheeling of every bonnet in Sussex, and Charlotte’s hand crept into hers along the pew cushion, and from the front rank of the gentry seats Lady Fenwick, who had arrived early, in her best dove-grey, and stationed herself where the whole church was obliged to file past her, turned with the rest, raised her lorgnette in a slow deliberate arc, and bowed over it. The county’s own instrument of judgement, publicly reversed, in the sight of every household that had repeated her. It was, Robert murmured afterwards, the most expensive apology in the county’s living memory, and it had cost her nothing but everyone’s memory of the alternative. Lady Fenwick dealt in no other currency.

The second piece of news went round the churchyard before the first had cleared the porch; the physician, Mr Watson, had spoken. To the vicar, formally, on the Thursday, three years’ silence broken in six words, the parish said. Eleanor maintained it had been nearer eleven and two of them were finally, and the banns would run for both couples through the same Sundays, and the village, drunk on its own gossip, had already decided the match had been somehow its own doing, dating from the festival. No one was disposed to argue.

“Two weddings,” said Mrs Wilkins’s letter, come that week from Holborn in answer to Jane’s, for Jane had written to her, one of the strange, certain instincts of that fortnight, the letter of a woman paying her debts of attention backwards down the years. You will forgive a registry woman her records. I have placed one hundred and forty governesses, Miss Prescott, and I told you that you would do, and I enclose my card for your daughters’ governess in due season, the trade being best served early. I find I was never once so pleased to lose a client from my books.